3. “The Car Plays: San Diego,” La Jolla Playhouse:
This collection of dome-light dramas, staged in 10-minute bursts inside actual cars, violated just about every rule of theater but one: Make it great. Watching the stories unfold from just inches away felt almost unbearably intimate at times, yet it was maybe the most exhilarating stage experience of the year.
(In photo: Sara Wagner with playgoers in “Dead Battery.”)— J. Katarzyna Woronowicz

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3. “The Car Plays: San Diego,” La Jolla Playhouse:
This collection of dome-light dramas, staged in 10-minute bursts inside actual cars, violated just about every rule of theater but one: Make it great. Watching the stories unfold from just inches away felt almost unbearably intimate at times, yet it was maybe the most exhilarating stage experience of the year.
(In photo: Sara Wagner with playgoers in “Dead Battery.”)
/ J. Katarzyna Woronowicz

It’s never very comfortable, but hey, we’ve all been there: cowering in a vehicle’s back seat as one of the people up front hisses at the other: “I asked for a divorce, not a car.”

Or as, alternately, the lady behind the wheel climbs astride the guy riding shotgun for a quick bout of bucket-seat love — and then (in the throes of passion) calls him by the wrong name.

Or, perhaps, as a couple of the occupants just start barking.

But when the actors in “The Car Plays: San Diego” start reeling their audience into these dome-light dramas, that’s your cue, Mr. or Ms. Captive Passenger, to begin squirming in earnest.

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt quite so awkward at a theater performance as I did in witnessing 10 of the 15 short works now being staged inside actual cars at La Jolla Playhouse.

I do know, though, that I loved just about every mortifying minute of it.

Not all the 10-minute playlets in this gleefully boundary-busting production are as in-your-lap as all that. But there’s such an obvious and instant intimacy to the setup that even a car-sized “Our Town” could take on shades of Tarantino.

So the dime-a-dozen troubles between husband and wife in Stephanie Alison Walker’s “It’s Not About the Car” (directed with a beautifully syncopated tension by Ion Theatre’s Claudio Raygoza) take on a desperate and wrenching edge via the playgoers’ act of accidental voyeurism.

The front-seat tryst in JJ Strong’s “The Love of Make-Believe” is window-fogging enough to summon the vice squad to the vehicle (and crimson to playgoers’ cheeks).

And the dogs in Steve Lozier’s “We Wait” ... well, “Car Plays” audiences are warned at the start not to touch the actors, but who wouldn’t at least ponder patting the howling heads of these lonely, locked-in pooches (played by Wendy Waddell and Judy Bauerlein)?

Paul Stein, who conceived the well-traveled “Car Plays” idea for the L.A.-based troupe Moving Arts, has done superb work in putting together the La Jolla version’s mix of plays — some brand-new, some from previous editions.

Among the 30 actors are some 15 from San Diego, along with seven locally based directors (Raygoza and Lisa Berger of “We Wait” among them) and four UC San Diego-connected playwrights.

The basic setup: Playgoers are paired off to see one of three five-car sets of performances (each set takes about an hour). While there’s always an audience of two, the cast for each play varies from one to three. As the plays end — amazingly enough, more or less simultaneously — carhops usher you to the next.

In UC San Diego grad Jennifer Barclay’s darkly witty mystery “The Carpool,” directed by Delicia Turner Sonnenberg of Moxie Theatre, not only does one actor sit between the playgoers, but the latter are actually addressed by character name. (Barclay comes up with ingenious plot points to discourage them from chiming in.)

Part of the power of “The Car Plays” is the sense it creates of somehow being implicated, simply by witnessing words and actions you can’t pretend to have missed or ignored (unlike in a darkened theater). And there’s the added irony that, under normal circumstances, driving home from a difficult or demanding play can serve as a time to decompress. Here, instead of shutting out the world, you’re sealed into a series of new ones, whose rules are ever-shifting and anything but certain.

I can’t say enough about one play in particular by Kiff Scholl called “The Audience” — and yet I can’t say too much, because its premise is everything (although the actors, Ron Morehouse and David Youse, are matchless). Suffice to describe it as the funniest 10-minute identity crisis you’re likely ever to cringe through.